The present invention relates to the display of signal characteristics, and more particulary to a status ribbon for display of signal characteristics for multiple channels/codes.
A band of frequencies may contain many channels of content, such as in cable television systems, or a single digital communications radio frequency (RF) channel may contain many codes, such as in wireless telephone systems. An operator trying to quickly assess the health of such systems would like a way to scan the power, or some other measurement parameter, for each channel or code and view the results in a single display. Such a single display of power for multiple channels of a cable television system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,685,065 for a portable spectrum analyzer. In this implementation the single display consists of a bar graph where the channel number is along the horizontal axis and the power is along the vertical axis, with the height of the bar indicating the relative power for each of the channels. This display is limited on the number of channels that may be compacted into a signal view. Also this does not address the need to translate measured values into pass/fail values for easier interpretation for the operator.
Also for the digital communications RF channel with many content “codes”, the operator may want to scan the activity for each code and view the results on the single display. However there may be more codes than a display device has pixels horizontally. Prior art does not represent multiple codes in a single indicator.
What is desired is an alternative display of signal characteristics for multiple channels/codes that compacts many more channels/codes into a single view, translates measured values into pass/fail values, and is intuitive for an operator, or alternatively compacts many codes within an RF channel into the single view so a single indicator represents multiple codes.